What Makes Him Tic?

By Albert Mobilio

Published: October 17, 1999

Motherless Brooklyn

By Jonathan Lethem.

311 pp. New York:

Doubleday. $23.95.

JUDGING by the energetic catholicity of his literary appropriations -- the hard-boiled novel, science fiction, westerns and the academic novel -- Jonathan Lethem appears to be both a scholar and a wide-eyed fan of any and all genre fiction. Taking his cue from writers like Don DeLillo and Philip K. Dick, who successfully blurred the lines between serious and popular novels, Lethem is like a kid in a candy store, grabbing all the tasty plots and gimmicks he can.

The title of Lethem's first novel, ''Gun, With Occasional Music,'' set its tone of judiciously mixed spoof and homage. His last novel, ''Girl in Landscape,'' gave elegant proof of his acute sense of genre convention; he so persuasively wove the plot of John Ford's classic western ''The Searchers'' into a tale of interplanetary travel that the joining felt not merely seamless but inevitable. The hybrid -- which also included an adolescent girl's coming-of-age tale -- cheated neither science fiction nor the western while giving birth to something fresh and strange. Unlike most straight genre practitioners, Lethem is in no hurry to get to his point; he is refitting the model for a slower drive with plenty of time to take in the sights.

This is amply apparent nearly a third of the way into his new novel, ''Motherless Brooklyn,'' another go-round with the hard-boiled genre. After the obligatory opening -- a stakeout that culminates in the murder of a detective's boss -- Lethem provides a dilatory flashback to fill us in on the principals: Frank Minna, a small-time operator and the chief eminence of a car service-detective agency in downtown Brooklyn, and his ''Minna Men,'' the four orphans he more or less adopts from St. Vincent's Home for Boys. Surely, Ross Macdonald would never throw so big a stick into the spokes; Lethem not only takes this risk but further gums up the works by offering as his narrator the hapless gumshoe Lionel Essrog, who suffers from Tourette's syndrome. Essrog can hardly get out a sentence without jangling its sense with eruptions of ''Stickmebailey!'' or toss away someone's gun without having to throw another four things, including his shoe. Rituals like this tend to ruffle a detective's Bogart impression.

Lethem makes Essrog's ''Tourette's brain'' virtually a character, as Essrog describes, with almost parental solicitude, the origins and mechanisms of its tics. He recalls how, as a child, Charlie Chaplin's and Buster Keaton's movies provided him with models, their characters ''blazing with aggression, disruptive energies barely contained.'' When those energies burst forth from him, they produce a pun-rife spume of broken words: ''friend of the deceased'' becomes ''mend the retreats,'' and Alfred Hitchcock mutates to ''Altered Houseclock'' or ''Ilford Hotchkiss.'' Essrog's own name blurts out botched yet packed with portent: ''Unreliable Chessgrub.''

These deliberately Joycean concoctions make up in glee what they lack in verisimilitude. Essrog's Tourette's never fades to a mere idiosyncrasy; indeed, one of the narrator's tics is to ''relate everything to my Tourette's'' and thus create a ''meta-Tourette's.'' While this ''ticcing'' impedes the headlong rush you expect from a murder mystery, it offers other, headier pleasures, like a disquisition on how the dysfunction ''teaches you to see the reality-knitting mechanism people employ to tuck away the intolerable, the incongruous, the disruptive.''

For Minna and his crew, Essrog is a ''special effect,'' but the inscrutable boss values him as a ''human freak show'' because, since he seems crazy, everyone thinks he's stupid. Minna is the father that Essrog, Tony, Gilbert and Danny never had, and he dispenses a slightly cracked version of paternal wisdom. He favors big-chested gals because ''a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling. . . . Otherwise, you're right up against her naked soul.'' Minna also wises them up to the ''wheels within wheels,'' the ''secret systems'' that run downtown Brooklyn, and this includes introducing them to a pair of aging mobsters named Matricardi and Rockaforte. This pair send the orphans on oddball errands, like smashing up a Ferris wheel at a Hispanic carnival, but Minna has forbidden his men ever to mention their names. (He allows only Essrog's helplessly oblique version, ''Garden State Bricco and Stuckface.'')

After Minna is stabbed and stuffed in a Dumpster in the book's opening pages, his band of ne'er-do-wells goes to work trying, in true ''Maltese Falcon'' style, to avenge the death of their colleague. The two brightest lights, Essrog and Tony Vermonte, take a somewhat stuttered lead, hampered as they are by mutual suspicions. Tony is masking not only his connections to the aging mobsters but his sexual relationship with Minna's widow, Julia. Essrog has always been smitten with her, so Tony's romance feels to him like a betrayal. For two days we trail Essrog around as he bumbles between Brooklyn and a Zen Buddhist school in Manhattan, slowly coming to understand the veiled world in which his mentor dwelled.